Mayhem - Esoteric Warfare (Black Metal)

Good grief. I like Mayhem's older work a great deal, but until recently I had enough sense to avoid their newer "music". Alas, sadly, curiosity got the better of me, and I forced myself to listen to this mallcore abomination stupidly titled Esoteric Warfare. It was even worse than I expected. Well, at least sitting here with detached wonderment and marvelling at how utterly worthless this album is has provided me with some mild entertainment.

Back on A Grand Declaration of War, Mayhem pulled off a reasonable fusion of typical if somewhat generic black metal riffing inside prog rock inspired compositions... surely a lesser art than the icy black metal of De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, but pretty classy nevertheless. It struck a nice balance between overt heavy metal accessibility and the few remnants of their old style, while retaining its artistry. I sort of like it.

Here, that balance is gone - this is all overt accessibility and zero artistry, and a good example of why whine rock and mallcore mix poorly with black metal music. Everything that made the band's best music distinct and creative has been tossed aside as Mayhem, or "The TRUE Mayhem" as they fraudulently call themselves, fully reside in the grey, indistinct netherworld between modern "extreme metal" aesthetics and following an insipid nu-metal formula from two decades ago. But this doesn't have keyboards or gothic elements, which makes it "more trve" to undiscerning posers, but it still reeks of Dimmu Borgir's fetid chug along "music".

If you demand nothing more from your music than the familiar comfort of well-worn song writing clichés and being "black metal" by superficial standards (such as harsh vocals, distorted guitars and blast beat drumming), you might enjoy this. Personally, I have a hard time thinking of many albums I'd less rather listen to.

Go buy a mainstream pop album before you'd buy this. It might be a shallow, trendy, one-dimensional and boring money-grab, but at least it'll be a shallow, trendy, one-dimensional and boring money-grab written by professional-quality hacks instead of one slapped together haphazardly for an undiscerning "underground" audience by Necrobutcher, Teloch and cie. If all you want is simple entertainment, might as well go all-out rather than throw away your money on main/piss-stream dinosaurs like The True Mayhem.

In short, Esoteric Warfare is generic and dumbed-down Mayhem. An embarrassing epitaph to a once-decent band.